


To All the Muffins I've Craved Before

by Agapanthus_Enthusiast



Category: To All the Boys I've Loved Before Series - Jenny Han, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)
Genre: Baking, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Marriage, Peter being an overprotective anxious freak but like in a cute way (but like also stop it), Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-06 19:22:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15892476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agapanthus_Enthusiast/pseuds/Agapanthus_Enthusiast
Summary: It's three in the morning, Lara Jean is eight months pregnant, all she wants in the world are some lemon poppy seed muffins, and it turns out Peter is an acceptable baking assistant when he's not frantically googling everything that could potentially go wrong in a pregnancy.





	To All the Muffins I've Craved Before

It’s three in the morning and I’m wide awake, desperately craving lemon poppy seed muffins. This is not a new state of affairs; lemon poppy seed muffins (or LPSMs, as Peter has taken to abbreviating them) have been all I’ve wanted throughout my pregnancy, and normally, I would just grab myself one from one of the several tupperware containers I usually keep fully stocked and positioned at various convenient locations around the house. But they’re all empty. I know this because I emptied the last one earlier this evening while we were watching _Veep_ , and then convinced myself that I could wait until tomorrow morning to make a new batch. I see now how foolish a hope that was.

When Margot was pregnant two years ago, she went through a saga of much weirder and shorter-lived cravings – she once Skyped me in the middle of the night in tears because all she wanted in the world was to put spray cheese on a Moon Pie and cram the whole thing in her mouth, and of course, neither is available anywhere in England, the land of no preservatives. When I offered to put some in her next care package, she said bitterly, “Don’t even bother, by then I’ll have moved on to just wanting to eat dirt, probably. God, I can’t wait until it’s over, Lara Jean. I’m huge and exhausted and always peeing and last week I ate three straight-up spoons of butter because the baby wanted me to. You just wait until it’s your turn.”

Of course, when Neil made his appearance, he turned out to be the absolute perfect baby, chubby and giggly and sleeping through the night so well that Margot and Ravi had to wake him up to feed him, and Margot’s ominous pronouncements turned into excited squeals of “Lara Jean, you just wait until it’s your turn!”

By the time I got pregnant after four months of trying, I was mentally prepared for the worst that Margot had experienced: intensely strange cravings, constant vomiting and nausea, swollen everything, wild mood swings, and – worst of all – preeclampsia, which causes crazy high blood pressure and can be really dangerous, and caused Margot to have to be on bed rest for the last several weeks of her pregnancy. If all that was the price for getting to create a person who is comprised half of me and half of my favorite person in the world, I’d gladly pay it.

But I’m eight months in now, and my pregnancy has been a walk in the park compared to poor Margot’s. Yes, my ankles are more swollen than I’d like, and my back hurts a lot of the time, and some days it feels like the baby is sitting directly on top of my bladder just to spite me, but I only had morning sickness a few times in my first trimester and then it went away, I feel almost as energetic as I always have been, I barely even miss sushi and wine, and I’ve only cried at a few ASPCA commercials. (And you know what? Those commercials are really freaking sad. Anyone with a heart _should_ cry at them.) My hair is thicker and glossier than ever because (fun fact!) hormones make it not fall out when you’re pregnant, and that thing about the glow? It’s _real._ My skin is perfect, and I don’t even need Korean sheet masks to achieve it. Even more shockingly, for the first time in my life, I’m not overthinking, or overanalyzing, or worrying. I’m just enjoying the present, and excited to meet our little girl when she comes.

Unfortunately, Peter, perhaps unsettled by the sudden lack of an anxious presence in our lives, has risen to the occasion to fill this void. Daddy says he sees it all the time in the spouses of pregnant women – he calls it “Acute Google-itis.” I saw the first glimmer of it when we counted to three together and looked at the test and saw two little lines, and we both screamed and Peter picked me up and swung me around, and we kissed, and it would have been one of the most unambiguously perfect moments of my life if he hadn’t then immediately put me down, looked panicky, and grabbed his phone to google “is picking up pregnant woman bad for baby.” (Answer: When said baby only consists of a few cells clumped together, no, it is not.) And it’s gotten steadily worse since then.

Don’t get me wrong, Peter’s been so, so wonderful, as I knew he would be. He comes to as many of my appointments with me as he can, holds my hand if I have to get blood drawn, rubs my lower back whenever that one nerve gets twingey, and has gotten really into decking out the nursery with me. (We settled on a star theme, and he spent forever putting up the constellation wallpaper I ordered so that it would be absolutely perfect and you couldn’t see the seam at all.) And every time I complain that I am puffy and gassy and unloveable, he says something to the effect of “You’re growing our kid’s organs inside of you right now, which makes you my hero and also kind of a wizard, and you’re beautiful and perfect and I love you.”

Unfortunately, as the months have passed and my bump has gotten bigger, he’s also grown increasingly hovery and overprotective and concerned that everything I eat, drink, and do could potentially hurt me or the baby. He googles literally every symptom I have (everything from back pain to the little freckle-looking dots that have popped up on my cheeks), has been frantically babyproofing everything despite the fact that our child hasn’t even been born yet and will not start crawling for another seven months at least, and the other day, he got huffy with me for having the audacity to bend down and pick up a hair tie that I’d dropped. No amount of calling him a helicopter husband will make him stop. If he doesn’t chill out when our daughter is born, I think I might actually end up being the more easygoing parent, a twist no one could have seen coming.

But right now, sleeping soundly next to me, his body curled toward me, one arm draped over my giant bump and the other somehow entangled in my hair, he’s not hovery or overprotective or a helicopter husband. He’s just Peter. And as I look at him, I’m hit with a wave of affection. Will I ever get tired of looking at that face? Impossible. 

The warm and fuzzy feelings are quickly overtaken by another swell of craving for a glorious LPSM. The baby gives me a little kick right on cue, as if to say, “Yes, Mommy, I too would love a delicious lemony treat,” and, well, who am I to start disappointing my daughter before she’s even born? I’ve baked these muffins so many times that I have it down to a science – most recipes say they take a total of 40 minutes (20 prep, 20 baking), but I’ve gotten so good at the prep that I’m averaging just 32 minutes from start to finish nowadays. I could satisfy my craving, take a picture for the blog, and be back in bed by the very respectable hour of 3:32 AM.

Ever so slowly, I start shifting the countless pillows from where they’re positioned around my legs and belly onto the foot of the bed. Then I roll myself over in tiny degrees so that I’m facing away from Peter. It’s hard to do anything quietly or subtly when you’re eight months pregnant, and I feel pretty smug for having gotten this far without causing Peter to even so much as stir. Until I sit up, and am abruptly reminded that I forgot to disentangle his fingers from my hair. 

I give a little yelp of pain and clamp a hand over my mouth, but it’s too late. Peter jolts straight upright and stares at me blearily. “Whashappening? Are you okay? Are you going into labor? Oh fuck, you’re going into labor.”

“Peter—” I say, but he is already scrabbling for his phone, a motion that yanks my head sideways like he’s an out-of-control ventriloquist and I’m his puppet. “Ow!”

“Oh god. Are you having a contraction?” Peter says. “Okay, it’s going to be fine. _You’re_ going to be fine. Just breathe through the pain like they said in that class, and then when it’s over I’ll call your dad, and the hospital, and—”

“No no no! I’m fine! It’s just—your hand—here.” I pull my hair free.

“Oh,” Peter says, sinking back down onto his pillow a bit. “So...you’re _not_ in labor?”

“Correct,” I say, simultaneously wanting to laugh and give him a hug.

Peter glances at his phone. “Then why were you getting up at three AM, Covey?”

I’m not sure how to answer this very reasonable question. If I lie and say I just had to go to the bathroom – which, in fairness to me, is not really a lie, as in all the excitement the baby has decided to assume her favorite position atop my bladder – I will be sacrificing those sweet, sweet LPSMs until tomorrow morning, and the thought of that makes me want to cry. (Literally, I can feel tears forming at the thought of not eating a muffin within the next 32 minutes. I have renewed sympathy for how Margot must have suffered during her Velveeta/Moon Pie phase.)

But if I tell the truth, I will have to endure rapid-fire lectures about how a) it’s inadvisable to eat poppy seeds in the last month of pregnancy because some hospitals drug-test pregnant women and poppy seeds might fool the test into thinking I’m on opiates, and b) at my appointment last week, Dr. Callahan said I “may want to take it a little easy” and avoid overly strenuous activities, because this was the point at which Margot started showing preeclampsia symptoms, and it often runs in families.  

After that appointment, Peter was whipping out his phone to google preeclampsia before we even got to the parking lot. “You should sit down,” he said. “I’ll go get the car.” 

I grabbed his hand before he could hit enter. “Stop it,” I said, glaring at him. “And don’t you dare google it. Dr. Callahan said I probably have nothing to worry about, remember? I’m pretty sure she meant that I should sit down when I’m tired and not, like, go for long hikes or start using a standing desk. Just. Please. Don’t worry. I’m _fine_. And I’m fully capable of walking thirty feet to the car.”

Peter hesitated, and then grudgingly put his phone back in his pocket. “Fine. I won’t. But you should stop baking so much.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. This is my job, and I’ve got a ton more recipes I need to perfect before the baby gets here. Like the sticky toffee pudding cake recipe. There’s something off about the consistency. It’s nowhere near ready to go in the book.”

Peter huffed out a breath. “Then let’s at least get you a kitchen stool!”

“It won’t work. It’d have to be really tall to be at the right angle for kneading, and then I wouldn’t even be able to climb into it.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’m serious, Peter, you have to stop worrying about me. Baking is not strenuous, I know my body, and I know when to take a break.”

He chewed his lip, and I could tell he wanted to argue more, but he finally said “Okay,” and changed the subject to pitching me his current favorite name (Delilah, which I vetoed out of hand due to that Plain White T’s song, which even I think is more creepy than romantic), and that evening I figured out the issue with the sticky toffee pudding cake (my date-to-water ratio was off) and he said it was surprisingly delicious for something that sounded like it should be served in a sketchy British nursing home, and everything was right and as it should be. 

Except at some point later that night, or maybe the next morning before I woke up, the idiot must have googled preeclampsia. Because since then, he’s been acting like every moment he sees me standing upright is a moment that brings me closer to my untimely demise.

So right now, the choice is either a) lie and somehow wait several more hours until he’s left for work to make more muffins, or b) tell the truth and get muffins as soon as I can bake them, but also get two heaping doses of Peter panic. Honestly, I don’t know which is worse.

To buy myself time to decide, I roll my eyes at him. “My last name's not Covey anymore, you dork. It’s been Kavinsky for, like, three years now. Remember? We had that one wedding?”

Peter mock-frowns. “Hmmm. Vaguely. You were wearing a white dress, right? And you waited to kiss me until that old man told us we could?”

“Yeah, that sounds like something I’d do,” I say, and he laughs.

“I don’t care what your last name is, you’ll always be Covey to me,” he says, and leans over to kiss the top of my head. “Seriously, though, why are you up?” 

I hesitate for one beat longer, and then cave and choose the option that comes with muffins. “I had a craving…”

“Ah,” he says. “LPSM?”

“What else?”

Peter frowns. “Lara Jean, poppy seeds can—”

“—fool a drug test into thinking I’m on opiates and potentially cause us to be investigated by CPS,” I intone, and cross my arms on top of my bump. “For the millionth time, Peter, UVA’s labor-and-delivery center doesn’t drug test moms unless there’s probable cause for them to do so.” 

“But what if they—”

“And even if they did,” I continue, steamrolling right over him, “being investigated by CPS is a risk I’m willing to take, especially given that I am not actually on opiates.” 

Peter gives me his “this isn’t over” look, but lets it drop. “I thought you had a tupperware on your nightstand.”

“I finished it this morning.”

“So you were going to get one from downstairs?”

“Uh…” If I lie and say yes, he’ll probably get suspicious when it takes me 32 minutes to go downstairs and come back again. “I finished all those stashes too.” 

Peter looks at me reproachfully. “So you were sneaking out at three in the morning to go bake some.”

“‘Sneaking’ implies wrongdoing,” I retort. “I was _considerately trying_ to not wake you up because it’s three in the morning. But yes, I’m going to go bake some because Jane won’t let me rest until I do.” 

That’s how we’ve been testing out names – continually tossing out suggestions in reference to my bump to see what sounds most natural. We’ve already decided we’re going to carry on my family’s tradition and give her the middle name Song, and lately I’ve been thinking Jane for her first name, as in Austen. Jane Song Kavinsky. Peter thinks it’s too short and simple. But maybe he’ll come around.

“Dr. Callahan said you should be taking it easy,” Peter says, as I knew he would. “I don’t think baking muffins at three in the morning is taking it easy.”

My stomach growls at the word ‘muffin.’ “Be that as it may, if you try to stop me right now, I cannot be held responsible for what I will do,” I say, narrowing my eyes at him.  

We stare at each other for a moment longer, and then Peter sighs and tosses the covers off of himself with a groan, revealing a bare torso that is, though no longer quite as finely cut as it was when we were in high school and college, still very impressive. “Fine. Let’s go.”

I stare at him. “What are you doing? Go back to bed, you have to work tomorrow.” (Technically, so do I, but since I work from home, I have the luxury of sleeping in.)

“You’re going to teach me how to make these things,” he says, tugging on an ancient UVA Lacrosse t-shirt. “And from now on, when you need them, it’ll be one less thing you have to stand up and bake.” 

I open my mouth to argue further, and then shut it. Every moment I sit here is a moment I could be bringing myself closer to an LPSM. “That’s very sweet, thank you,” I say, heaving myself to my feet and reflexively putting a hand on the small of my back, a motion Peter immediately registers.

“Is your back hurting again?” he asks, frowning.

“Nope! I’m all good!” I say almost defiantly, although in all honesty it _is_ twinging a bit, and head for the stairs.

I’m still not quite used to how much space we have now that we’re back in Virginia. Both of the New York City apartments Peter and I had once dreamed of – skyscrapers and brownstones – were extremely out of our immediately-post-college budgets, with Peter starting his first year of law school at NYU and me making barely anything as an assistant at a publishing house, so we lived in a tiny rent-controlled fifth-floor walkup in the East Village with a fire escape that I grew kitchen herbs on and strung with Edison bulbs, in a building that did not have a doorman but _did_ have what could loosely be described as a gym (it consisted of an elliptical, some weights, and a treadmill that was broken all six years we lived there). 

Our neighbors were all frenemies with each other, and by turns threw crazy whole-floor parties with themes such as “Health Goth Prom” and “Cats!” and got into immensely petty email fights about who kept throwing dog poop into the garbage chute, and the super cranked the entire building’s heat up to 80 the moment the temperature outside dipped below 65 so we’d have to have our windows open year-round even when it was below freezing out, and everything was always cramped and loud and dramatic and chaotic, and I wouldn’t have traded any of it for the world. 

By the time I found out I was pregnant this January, our budget and savings were (thankfully) considerably larger thanks to my book deal and Peter’s job as in-house counsel at EY, so we started looking at bigger apartments, and then I made the mistake of doing a “just curious” search in our hometown and shrieked aloud when I saw that we could put a down payment on a four-bedroom house for what it would cost to buy a dingy two-bedroom in Williamsburg. And then we started talking about moving back. Strictly in hypotheticals at first – _if_ we moved back, we could have a backyard, and adopt a dog once our kid (hopefully kids, plural, someday) was old enough to want one. _If_ we moved back, my dad and Trina and Peter’s mom could help babysit, and we could see Kitty and Owen more often when they were home from college. _If_ we moved back, we could find a house in our old public school district, which was one of the best in the state and nowhere near as expensive or difficult to navigate as New York City’s educational system. If if if. And then one day Peter looked at me and said, “What if we did move back?”

So now we have a house, and a yard, and stairs. Which Peter is currently guiding me down, one arm around my waist and the other under my elbow as if I’m a grandma who recently got her hip replaced. 

“I _can_ walk down these stairs without help, you know,” I inform him. “I’m pregnant, not elderly. Or drunk, obviously.”

“It’s for my own peace of mind,” he says. “You’re very front-heavy right now, you know.”

“Wow, thanks. I _thought_ something was a little different lately, but I just didn’t know what.”

Peter laughs, but doesn’t let go of me until we’re at the bottom of the stairs.

Even though it’s the middle of the night, I feel a rush of exhilarated joy as soon as I set foot in the kitchen, as I do every time. I never would have suspected that the baking blog I started in college to document my creations (and, okay, to ensure that Peter would miss my cookies almost as much as he missed me) would gradually build up the following that it has, eventually catching the eye of a culinary literary agent who offered me a generous enough advance for a book of recipes that I was able to quit my publishing job and go full-time with blogging and photographing and writing my book. When we bought the house, the kitchen was a grey linoleum nightmare, and I used some of the advance to remake it into my dream kitchen, with an island and six-range stove and built-in griddle for pancakes and, best of all, a professional-grade convection oven. It’s been finished for three months, and I still can’t believe it’s all mine.

I head for the pantry to grab what I need, but Peter shoots an arm out, blocking me as if I’m a basketball player on the opposing team. “Go sit down,” he says, pointing at one of the bar stools lined up in front of the island. “Just tell me what we need and I’ll get everything out.”

“Oh, stop it,” I say, nudging his outstretched arm out of the way and opening the pantry door. “You don’t know where anything is. You’ll just mess up my system.”

Peter looks wounded. “I’m a grown adult, Lara Jean. I think I can handle taking out flour and putting it back.” 

I pull out the neatly labeled containers of flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and poppy seeds – Peter teased me mercilessly for including a label maker on our wedding registry, but I use it all the time, way more than the whiskey stones _he_ insisted we register for, so the joke’s on him. “Well, I, too, am a grown adult who can handle lifting small objects,” I say. “Look!”

To distract him from arguing further about how even small objects can be dangerous in my delicate state, I balance the baking soda on top of my bump and walk over to the island without dropping it – a skill I realized I possessed yesterday. “It’s like a built-in shelf!” I say delightedly. In spite of himself, Peter cracks up.

“My wife, the incredible human storage unit,” he says, opening the fridge. “You should audition for Cirque du Soleil. I’m guessing you need a lemon for this? And eggs, and butter?”

“Yes, and also yogurt,” I tell him.

“Yogurt? In muffins? Are you sure?”

I give him a look, and even though he’s facing away from me, he must sense it because he says, “Yep, sorry, of course you’re sure, I’ll get the yogurt.” 

I smile to myself as I pull out a muffin tin and preheat the oven. Even after more than ten years together, I love these little reminders of how well we know each other – I hoard them like the dragon in _The Hobbit_ hoards gold. 

“What do I do now?” Peter asks as I set down the muffin tin.

I eye him, trying to decide what the safest route here is. Peter has many talents (he finally mastered French braiding during our first year in New York), but somehow, the precise science that is baking still eludes him. “You can zest the lemon,” I decide, and pull the zester out of the “random utensils” drawer. “Just be careful to only get the outer skin, we don’t want any of the pith.” 

“The what?”

“The bitter white part,” I say as I start to measure out the dry ingredients.  

“Oh, okay,” Peter says, and starts zesting into a bowl. “Wait, what are you doing with the other stuff?”

“Um, mixing it together?”

“Right, but like, how much of everything? Do you have a recipe?”

“Yeah, I put it on the blog a few months ago,” I say, whisking the dry ingredients. “But at this point it’s all from memory.” 

Peter pauses his zesting. “How am I supposed to learn how to make them if you’re just throwing everything in from memory and giving me the easy job?” 

“You don’t have to learn how to make them! I’ve never asked _you_ to teach me about financial regulatory law,” I say.

“Financial regulatory law isn’t dangerous in the last trimester of pregnancy!”

“Neither is baking!”

We narrow our eyes at each other for a moment, and then I resume whisking. “Combining the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients and then folding those together is a foundational principle of baking,” I say. “Given how many times you’ve seen me do those things, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.”

Peter throws a little piece of zest at me, and I give an indignant squawk when it lodges somewhere in my hair. “Serves you right for getting preachy,” he says, smirking as I shake out my hair.

Infuriating though he is, I’m hit with another pang of affection as I look at his smug expression, and I want to capture this moment forever. “Wait, I want a picture for the blog!” I say, and release the whisk. “Keep zesting, I’ll run back up and grab my camera and be right back.”

“No!” Peter says, so forcefully that I freeze in surprise. “Just use my phone. Here.”

My lips press into a thin line, but I take the phone and snap a picture of Peter zesting anyway.

“Aren’t your followers tired of seeing LPSMs?” he says, and I can tell that _he_ can tell I’m annoyed, and he’s trying to smooth things over.  

“No. They think it’s funny. And I space out the LPSM posts enough that they have other things to look at in between,” I say. I hesitate – I don’t want to reward his behavior with a compliment – but admit, “They also love it whenever I post something with you in it. That fake box-cake tutorial we made featuring you for April Fool’s Day this year is still my most-read post of all time.”

Peter is predictably delighted by this information. “Are you serious?” he says. “Can I have my phone?” 

I hand it to him, and he searches through my blog until he finds the post in question, then gives the phone back to me. “Read me the best comments,” he orders.

“Oh my god, you’re unbelievable,” I say, laughing. “This is exactly why I never told you about this. Your head’s going to swell up so big you won’t be able to walk through doors.” 

Peter gives me puppy eyes, and I relent. “Fine. SweetChick323 said, ‘Christ on a bike, I don’t know what this man is selling but I’ll take 10.’ TastyTuesdays said, ‘I know this is an April Fool’s joke, and I love Lara Jean, but I would literally follow a blog that consisted of watching her husband watching paint dry.’ That one has, like, 70 likes. EarhartLived said, ‘OMG if your boy told me to bake my firstborn I’d probably do it.’” 

“Damn, that’s a little dark,” Peter says. “Also, I think I’ve gotten all the zest I’m going to get out of this lemon, what do I do now?”

“Whisk it in a bowl with the yogurt and the eggs until they’re all smooth,” I say. “I’m surprised you’re not more excited that more than 70 baking aficionados would watch closed-circuit TV of your face.” 

“Well, of course they would,” he says, ruffling his hair and Blue Steel-ing at me, and I snort. “What else did they say?”

“Um…” His whisking technique is a bit erratic, and I can tell that clumps of yogurt and egg are about to start flying out of the bowl. “Maybe ease up on the whisking a little bit?” 

He obeys, and I look at the phone again. “Let’s see…VeronicaMars4Lyfe7 said, ‘DAMN, wish he’d put a bun in MY oven.’ PeetaMyAss said – oh, actually, that one’s really dirty, I’m skipping that one.”

“Wait, but now I really want to hear it,” Peter says.

“I’m skipping it! You can read it on your own time, at your own risk. I think we’re ready to combine the wet and dry ingredients,” I say, and push the bowl of dry ingredients toward him. “Fold the yogurt mix in super slowly, and then we’ll add the butter.” 

Peter looks at me blankly. “Fold?”

I sigh, walk around to his side of the island, and grab a spatula from the utensil jar to demonstrate. “Like this. See? But don’t do it too much because we don’t want to overmix it.” 

“How is that even a thing?”

“I don’t know, but it is.” 

Peter shakes his head, but manages to successfully fold the contents of the two bowls together, as well as the butter. “Is this good, sensei?” he says, holding the bowl out for my inspection. 

“It’s acceptable,” I say, peering in. “I’d give it a B+. I see a few lumps.”

Peter sticks his tongue out at me as I carefully pour the mixture into the muffin tin. “Do you want to lick the bowl?” I ask when I’m done, offering it to him. Normally, I’d love to, but raw eggs and pregnancy do not mix.

“Sure,” Peter says, running a finger along the inside of the bowl and licking it. He starts to offer it to me, and then stops. “Wait, you can’t have any. Salmonella.” 

“I know! I wasn’t going to,” I say, starting to get irritated again, and pick up the muffin tin to put it in the oven.

Once again, Peter intercepts me. “I’ll do it,” he says, grabbing the tin. 

“Peter, seriously, I’d be bending down, like, a foot,” I say, glaring at his back as he opens the oven and sticks the batter in. 

“Bending down is not taking it easy!”

“I’ll show you not taking it easy,” I mutter darkly, and Peter ignores me as he closes the oven door.

“Now what?” he says.

“Now we wait for twenty minutes,” I say, twisting the magnetic kitchen timer on the fridge and then walking over to the couch. I flop down, and Peter sits next to me, pulling my feet into his lap out of long-established habit.

“So what should we do for twenty minutes?” he asks, and immediately, despite how annoyed I am with him, I have a new kind of craving. The one third-trimester pregnancy symptom I have that Margot did not is, to put it in romance-novel terms, a simmering fire in my loins, as the prehistoric cavewoman part of my brain takes over and goes “ME WANT MAN! NOW!!”

Usually, this flares up at incredibly inconvenient times when Peter isn’t even around, but for once, Peter _is_ around, and, well, the cavewoman wants what she wants. Without even responding, I scoot myself toward Peter, who grabs my hands to reel me in like a fish, amusement and desire on his face, until I’m sitting on his lap, straddling him, his arms firmly braced around my lower back. I kiss him, hard and frantic, and my body instinctually arches toward him. He lets out a little “oof” into my mouth as my bump squishes his stomach, and I pull back, abashed. “Sorry, am I crushing you?” 

“Nah. There’s just something between us,” Peter says, running one hand over the bump, and looks astonished at my blank expression. “C’mon! It’s from _Juno_! How have you not seen _Juno_?”

 “We’ll add it to the list,” I say, and then he’s kissing me again and I can’t think, can’t do anything except twine my fingers in his hair and melt into him. He slips his hand under my giant sleeping shirt to skim over my belly and cup my (almost C-cup these days!) breasts, and I can feel him hard against me, and I don’t even care that I usually require a healthy amount of foreplay and we’ve only been making out for, like, two minutes tops, I need him inside me now, now, now, and I’m reaching down to tug off his sweatpants when he freezes.  

“What?” I pant, pulling back, literally quivering with pent-up sexual fury. (These third trimester hormones are really no joke.)

“I don’t think we should,” he says. “It’s—”

My nostrils flare. “Peter Grant Kavinsky, if you say ‘not taking it easy’ right now, I’m going to—”

“I wasn’t!” he says hastily, and, I think, untruthfully. “Let’s just be careful, okay?” 

He angles his head toward me again, but I plant a hand on his face. “What is going on with you?” I demand. “You’ve been so crazy paranoid lately.”

Peter nips at my hand, and I move it away. I don’t feel like playing anymore. “Nothing. I’m just—better safe than sorry.”

“Bullshit,” I snap, and his eyebrows shoot up. “You googled preeclampsia, didn’t you?” 

He has the grace to look ashamed. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “I couldn’t help it.” 

I soften a little. “I mean, I googled it too, and yeah, it’s kind of scary,” I admit. “But I don’t have any of the symptoms of it, other than the swollen ankles, and it’s totally fine for us to have sex in the third trimester. I asked.”

Peter shoots me an amused look. “You did, did you?”

“Yes,” I say, and quickly move on. “I just don’t get why you’ve been in this much of a helicopter-y tailspin.”

Peter pulls me closer to him, and I wrap my arms around him as he nuzzles his head into my shoulder. “I don’t know. There’s so much about this whole thing that we can’t control, and...I keep...” He swallows hard. “I keep thinking about your mom, Lara Jean.” 

I feel a lump in my throat, and I swallow too.

“How she was there one minute, and then the next, she wasn’t,” he goes on. “I know I can’t shield you and Delilah—”

“Not going to happen, Kavinsky.” 

“—from everything, but I just, it’s not fair that you have to take on the entire physical burden of growing our baby, and I feel like I have do whatever I can to make it less risky for you.”

I lean back and cup his face in my hands, staring into those gold-flecked eyes I love so much. “I get it. I do. But it’s not just pregnancy that’s risky, Peter, _life_ is risky. We can’t know what’s going to happen, and I know it’s scary, but that doesn’t mean we should all live our lives like we’re made of glass. That’s no way to live, and it’s no way for a child to grow up. It’s not how _we_ grew up, and we turned out fine.” 

“I know,” Peter says, and he sighs. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m used to being the more rational one of us. I’m down here on earth, and I pull you back down when your head’s floating around in space. But you, little girl,” he says to my bump, “you make me crazy.”

The baby nudges me. I think she loves Peter’s voice as much as I do.

“I thought _I_ made you crazy,” I say, pouting at him in mock jealousy.

“Oh, you do. This is on another level. But Lara Jean, I really am sorry. I’ll try not to worry so much,” he says. “About you, and about…” he pauses. “Elizabeth Jane.”

I tilt my head, considering. “Elizabeth Jane?”

“See, I like Jane, but it’s too short on its own,” Peter says quickly, so quickly that I can tell he’s been sitting on this for a while. “And I love that you have two first names. And Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a _lot_ of love letters, so we all have that in common. Although I don’t think she ever wrote them to five different guys.”

I swat at him, and he catches my hand, laughing.

“And Elizabeth has a ton of nicknames, so if Elizabeth Jane’s too much of a mouthful, she could be Eliza Jane, or Ella Jane, or—”

“—Libby Jane,” I say, my smile growing wider, and the baby gives me a little nudge, as if in agreement.

“Yeah!” Peter says, grinning too. “Libby Jane. Our own little LJ. LJ Junior. LJJ?”

“Shut up before I change my mind,” I say, and lean in to kiss him again. This time, when I reach down to pull off his sweatpants, he helps me.

By the time we make it off the couch, the muffins are burnt to a crisp. I couldn’t care less.


End file.
